Helen Elizabeth McCrory

Background

Helen McCrory was born on 17 August 1968, in Paddington, London, England. Her father, Iain McCrory, is a diplomat from Glasgow, Scotland, and her mother, physiotherapist Anne McCrory, is Welsh. She has two siblings: a brother named John and a sister named Catherine. She grew up in Nigeria, Norway, Cameroon, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Tanzania, and Paris, among other places.

Education

Due to her father's position, Helen McCrory spent a portion of her childhood abroad in far-flung places like Norway, Cameroon, and Madagascar, before attending the Queenswood School, a girls-only boarding school in Hertfordshire.

At 17, she applied to the Drama Centre in London, but was urged to "go and live a bit" by the administration, which prompted more travels to Italy and Thailand, among other places. Upon her return, McCrory was accepted into the Centre and graduated in 1990.

Career

After graduation, she began an impressive and award-winning string of appearances on London stages in both classical and modern productions. She made her first television appearances in 1993, with her movie debut coming a year later in "Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles" (1994). McCrory's breakout performance as a young Welsh woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy in "Streetlife" (BBC, 1995) earned her Best Actress Awards from BAFTA Cyrmu (Welsh BAFTA) and the Royal Television Society; by the following year, she was headlining television projects like "The Fragile Heart" (1996) and the 2000 adaptation of "Anna Karenina" (Channel 4/PBS, 2000/2001).

International audiences slowly became aware of her talents in the early 2000s thanks to appearances in features like "Charlotte Gray" (2001) with Cate Blanchett and as Barbara Villiers, the notorious mistress of Charles II (Rufus Sewell) in "Charles II: The Power and The Passion" (BBC One), which earned her a Satellite Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

McCrory also maintained a consistent and celebrated presence on the British stage, including a turn as Rosalind in a West End production of "As You Like It" that brought her a 2006 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award nomination. In 2006, she married actor Damian Lewis and gave birth to the first of their two children; her pregnancy forced her to pull out of the role of Bellatrix Lestrange in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (2007), but she returned to the fantasy franchise for its last three installments ("Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," 2009, and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part I," 2010 and "Part II," 2011) as Narcissa Malfoy, Lestrange's sister and the wife and mother, respectively, of key villains Lucius and Draco Malfoy.

McCrory also scored a critical triumph as Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in "The Queen" (2006), and reprised the role in "The Special Relationship" (HBO/BBC, 2009). The success of these and other performances gave McCrory's screen profile a considerable boost, and she was soon featured in major productions like Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" (2011) and the James Bond adventure "Skyfall" (2012). She remained faithful to the stage, earning critical praise as Medea in a 2014 production for the National Theatre, and continued to play complex female roles on television, most notably in the period gangster drama series "Peaky Blinders" (BBC Two, 2013) and "Penny Dreadful" (Showtime, 2014-16) as Evelyn Poole, a spiritualist who secretly heads a coven of witches.

She was featured as Sophie Smith in the comedy-drama film ‘Their Finest’ in 2016. In 2017, she starred as Louise Chevalier in ‘Loving Vincent’, an experimental animated biographical drama movie about the life of painter Vincent van Gogh, mainly covering the circumstances of his death. Also in 2017, the actress appeared in six episode of ‘Fearless’.

Achievements

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  British actress Helen McCrory's celebrated career on the English stage led to award-winning performances on UK television and supporting turns as a wide variety of memorable, often sensuous women in features like "The Queen" (2006), "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (2007) and "Skyfall" (2012) before making a splash on American television in "Penny Dreadful" (Showtime, 2014-16).
  
  She won the Manchester Evening News' Best Actress Award for her performance in the National Theatre's "Blood Wedding" and the Ian Charleson award for classical acting for playing "Rose Trelawney" in "Trelawney of the Wells". On the small screen, Helen's first television film, Karl Francis' Screen Two: Streetlife (1995) with Rhys Ifans, won her the Welsh BAFTA, Monte Carlo Best Actress Award and the Royal Television Society's Best Actress Award, for her extraordinary performance as "Jo". She went on to win Critics Circle Best Actress Award for her role as the barrister "Rose Fitzgerald" in the Channel 4 series North Square (2000), having been previously nominated for her performance in The Fragile Heart (1996).
  
  McCrory was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to drama.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Loving Vincent

    (The world's first fully oil painted feature film brings t...)

    2017
  • 4.3.2.1

    (This sexy crime thriller tracks 4 best friends over 3 day...)

    2010
  • Bill

    (Bill tells the story of what really happened during Shake...)

    2015
  • Charlotte Gray

    (Cate Blanchett enthralls as Charlotte, who goes behind en...)

    2001
  • A Little Chaos

    (When King Louis XIV announces a project to build a garden...)

    2014
  • The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death

    (40 years after the first haunting at Eel Marsh House, a g...)

    2015
  • Their Finest

    (Catrin, an untried screenwriter, and a makeshift cast and...)

    2016
  • Uncovered

    (An art restorer (Kate Beckinsale) investigates the signif...)

    1994
  • The Queen

    (After the death of Princess Diana, HRM Queen Elizabeth II...)

    2006
  • Hugo

    (Set in 1930s Paris, an orphan who lives in the walls of a...)

    2011
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

    (Harry, Ron and Hermione set out on their perilous mission...)

    2011
  • Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles

    (Boxoffice superstar Tom Cruise ("A Few Good Men, " "The F...)

    1994
  • Flying Blind

    (The love story of an older woman and a young Muslim man, ...)

    2013
  • Hotel Splendide

    (A chef (Toni Collette) seeks reconciliation with her brot...)

    2000
  • Flashbacks of a Fool

    (Daniel Craig (James Bond Franchise) is Joe Scott, a washe...)

    2008
  • The Count Of Monte Cristo

    (A wrongfully imprisoned man plots his escape and plan for...)

    2002
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

    (After Voldemort takes over the Ministry of Magic, Harry, ...)

    2010
  • Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

    (Voldemort is tightening his grip on Hogwarts™ and it is n...)

    2009
  • Enduring Love

    (Two strangers become dangerously close after witnessing a...)

    2004
  • Skyfall

    (Bond's loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to h...)

    2012
  • Casanova

    (The story of the legendary lover and his exploits with wo...)

    2005
  • Becoming Jane

    (Meet twentyish Jane Austen: in love...and on a path that ...)

    2007
  • Fantastic Mr. Fox

    (Mr. and Mrs. Fox live a happy home life with their eccent...)

    2009

• TV series

  • The Jury

    (The highly publicized murder trial of a young Sikh studen...)

    2002
  • The Fragile Heart

    (Oscar® nominee Nigel Hawthorne (The Madness of King Georg...)

    1996
  • Fearless

    (Emma Banville sets out to prove the innocence of Kevin Ru...)

    2017
  • Anna Karenina

    (One of the greatest books of all time comes alive in this...)

    2000
  • Trial & Retribution

    (Like Law & Order, this long-running British detective ser...)

    1997
  • Quiz

    (Charles Ingram causes a scandal after being caught cheati...)

    2020
  • Peaky Blinders

    (Tommy Shelby, a dangerous man, leads the Peaky Blinders, ...)

    2013
  • MotherFatherSon

    (A psycho-thriller set within systems of power in politics...)

    2019
  • Penny Dreadful

    (Some of literature's most terrifying characters, includin...)

    2014

Views

Helen McCrory is an honorary patron of the London children's charity Scene & Heard. During the COVID-19 pandemic McCrory and Lewis supported Feed NHS, a program to give food from high street restaurants to NHS staff, and had raised £1m for the charity by early April of that year. The initiative started in London but following its success plans were announced to roll it out to other cities in the UK.

Connections

On 4 July 2007, McCrory married actor Damian Lewis. They have a daughter, Manon (born 8 September 2006), and a son, Gulliver (born 2 November 2007). They have homes in Tufnell Park, north London, and near Sudbury in Suffolk.